The usage, transportation, and storage of hazardous materials create many safety and environmental issues. More specifically, during usage, transportation, and storage of hazardous materials, leaks can release toxic or explosive gas into the surrounding environment. For example, industrial equipment used in the oil, gas, utility, and chemical industries can release toxic gas into the surrounding environment. As another example, hazardous gases can pose a threat to homeland security. In many cases, the hazardous gas is odorless, colorless, and spreads quickly. As a result thereof, it can be quite difficult to detect and locate the source of the leak.
Further, the importance of helping soldiers identify improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the field is clear. These explosive devices can have very low vapor pressures. Thus, it can be quite difficult to locate and identify the explosive devices.
Recently, it has been determined that laser sources that generate light in the mid infrared (“MIR”) range are particularly useful in absorption spectroscopy applications since many gases of interest have their fundamental vibrational modes in the MIR range, and thus present strong, unique absorption signatures within the MIR range.
Unfortunately, heat, wind, and dust all create unstable atmospheric conditions that can distort the MIR beam delivery and return paths on a sub-second time scale. This in turn can lead to significant distortions in acquired spectral patterns if the measurement time is long (e.g. greater than twenty-five milliseconds) compared to the atmospheric stability.
To understand the challenges of the problem, consider the reflectance spectra of Research Department Explosives (“RDX”) residues on stainless steel. As provided herein, the vibrational spectra of the RDX residues are rich in identifying features, but require a broad spectral sweep in approximately the six to fourteen micron (6-14 um) range to acquire enough information to both detect and identify the explosive type. Further, as provided herein, the influence of the unstable atmospheric conditions on the spectral results are reduced if the spectral data is acquired rapidly (e.g. less than ten milliseconds). Thus, a field-ready spectrometer will not only require a broad spectral sweep, but also extremely fast spectral acquisition times.
Moreover, in order to detect a wide range of gases, the laser source must generate an output beam that consists of a set of sequential pulses of light that rapidly span a portion or the entire the MIR range with sufficient laser power.